Summary

Mass view and edit content in a summary table

Version

Version 1.0.0

Copyright and licence

Copyright 2007 Red Innovation

Licenced under GPL.

Purpose

Summary product adds a new field type "SummaryField". SummaryField allows viewing and editing data collected from other content objects. Data is displayed as a table which acts as a shortcut for quick overviews and mass editing.

• Collect information from other objects
• Display it in easy-to-digest table form
• Edit data without the need of going through many clicks to the object edit view

This product is aimed for Plone developers only. Python knowledge is needed for the product usage.

The orignal use case for this product was editing of a hospital patient visit information. A doctor needed to have a quick look to patient visit and laboratory measurement information.

Other imaginary use cases:

• Mass review content based on author name and content title
• Spreadsheet kind of data input
• Replace some Smart Folders use cases with a possibility to edit values too

See screenshots.

Features

• Default action is to collect and edit data from child content objects and their fields. Content objects appear as rows and field appear as column in the resulting table.
• Provides a flexible API for custom storage backends and use cases
• Different computed values can be placed to the summary table
• Per cell edit control disabling - no accidental misedits of already valid data
• Per cell input value validation

Out-of-box supported field and widget types

• Text fields
• Integer fields
• Floating point fields
• Selection list fields

Installation

Use Plone quick installer to install demo types if you wish to see the product in action. 

Usage

Please see supplied demo content types and their source code how to use this product.

Comparison with DataGridField

Feature comparison with DataGridField product which is another table editor component

Features in DataGridField	Features in Summary
Stores data in object field	Stores data in arbitary storage backend
Cool Javascripted UI to add new rows easily	New rows cannot be added without a custom code
Rich stylesheet customization hooks	Per cell input value validators
	Per cell input value locking
	Works around some ZPublisher limitations
	Rich stylesheet customization hooks
	More flexible API

Quality assurance

The product is supplied with basic unit tests.

Following product combination was used for system testing

• Plone 2.5.1
• Windows XP
• IE 6.0
• Firefox 1.5
• Opera 9.0

Known bugs

• SummaryField understands only A-Z, 0-9 and dash in ids. Other ids will break the code.

Sponsorship

This product development was sponsored by ZiteLab.

Contact

Use plone.org product area issue tracker to report bugs and suggestions for the product.

To ask help, to sponsor product development or to hire skilled Plone developers, please contact us.info@redinnovation.com

www.redinnovation.com

Wishing a happy Ploning,

Mikko "Moo" Ohtamaa